1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to the field of computer systems and, more particularly, to data storage systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a typical prior art data volume, whenever the data changes, the corresponding blocks are changed in situ. This is adequate as far as today's applications like relational databases and file systems are concerned. However, conventional data volume management techniques do not lend themselves to maintaining and processing temporal or time-varying information. Applications such as data mining, data warehousing, media libraries, medical records, etc. may need to maintain and/or process temporal or time-varying information. There is no single infrastructure in the prior art that can allow the applications in these fields to manage temporal data. Due to lack of an infrastructure in storage, prior art applications typically use brute force methods that tend to be inefficient to support the temporal paradigm. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a logical device-level infrastructure for generically managing temporal data across a variety of applications.